[declaredapple]

They've been very happy selling shovels at a steep margin to literally endless customers.

The reason is because they instantly get a risk free guaranteed VERY healthy margin on every card they sell, and there's endless customers lined up for them.

If they kept the cards, they give up the opportunity to make those margins, and instead take the risk that they'll develop a money generating service (that makes more money then selling the cards).

This way there's no risk of: A competitor out competing them, not successfully developing a profitable product, "the ai bubble popping", stagnating development, etc.

There's also the advantage that this capital has allowed them to buy up most of TSMC's production capacity, which limits the competitors like Google's TPUs.